Film Screening: MORE EARTH WILL FALL

Set inside one of Brazil’s largest favelas, More Earth Will Fall is a documentary feature that cuts through the sensationalism of guns, drugs and gangs to tell the intimate story of one family’s struggle to realise a simple dream.

The film paints a moving and intimate portrait of a family struggling to lead a “normal life”, perched on the hillside in an ‘Area of Risk’ at the top of Rio’s largest and most notorious favelas, Rocinha. Largely forgotten by the state, their community is severely underdeveloped with no building regulation or access to sanitation. All around them the drug gangs, who control the favela, fight it out with the police.

Their dream is to have “a home with a bathroom and kitchen” and to be free from the constant violence between invading police and resident drug-traffickers and there is hope on the horizon. The government proposes to remove the drug-traffickers for good. It is also relocating families from the Area of Risk where parents Vito, Rosangela and their children, along with thousands of others live in poorly structured wooden huts vulnerable to landslides and fire. But the question remains as to whether these simple promises will offer solutions to a community’s complex problems.

More Earth Will Fall benefits from the long period of filming and the intimate relationships established by the filmmakers. The audience become ‘insiders’ in the life of a family struggling against the odds to survive and prosper – a perspective that has been absent from often more sensationalist coverage of Brazil, particularly favelas. Whilst the film’s strength lies in the focus on one family’s life in Rocinha, the story echoes the lives of working class people across the globe as they strive to maintain their hope and faith in a better future.

Shot by two North London residents, we’ve invited them to screen the film to the local community with an opportunity for Q&A after the film. The team are currently raising money so that they can travel back to Brazil and make sure that the film is seen be local residents, and the wider community.